1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of digital surveys and testing methods. More specifically, this invention relates to creating and implementing scalable and effective surveys and testing methods, each with human interaction proof (HIP) capabilities.
2. Description of the Related Art
CAPTCHAs
The growth of Internet usage across different interfaces and devices has led to widespread adoption across many demographics. The number of websites is ever increasing and more financial transactions take place on the Internet. Websites are widely used to provide users with a convenient way to order products, e.g. tickets, to access personal account information, to open new email accounts, to add content to existing content such as comments on blogs, to upload multi-media content on websites, or to access other services. These systems are not only convenient to website owners as well as to their users, but they also reduce overall costs.
Unfortunately, such websites and associated systems may also provide a loophole through which hackers may obtain access to such websites or associated systems. For example, such hackers may access personal or other restricted data, disrupt services, poison existing content with irrelevant information declining the value of existing content, consume all the resources of the website for malicious activities, and distribute worms or spam. Such undesirable activity is commonly accomplished through the use of automated bots, scripts, and other malicious computer programs.
The presence and activities of such undesirable computer programs have led to the development of Human Interaction Proof (HIP) technology. HIP capabilities include challenges designed to be solved by humans. For example, typically HIP challenges may be easier for humans to solve, but difficult enough to make the cost of developing or processing a malicious bot or script to break it, uneconomical and challenging.
One widely used form of HIP technology is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). For purposes of understanding herein, CAPTCHA technology is a challenge-response process or system that attempts to ensure the response is from a human being. CAPTCHA usage has been found to help isolate human traffic from malicious bot or script traffic.
As well, it has been found that CAPTCHAs are fast becoming pervasive and useful across the Internet as sites move towards supporting collaborative, user-generated content, making the need for distinguishing genuine, human users from bots and scripts, as well as maintaining user privacy more critical.
Online, Digital Tests and Surveys
Online surveys have been a great resource for understanding consumer behavior, product pricing, product placement, market acceptance, etc. Some of such surveys are sent to private groups through e-mail or other type of digital messaging services. As well, some such surveys are being provisioned in large scale. For example, high traffic websites may host surveys to attract large amounts of attention.
Some current problems with such online surveys are that the surveys may be too long and may inadvertently attract less user attention than intended. As well, typically, users are not very engaged with survey challenges. Further, with current digital survey techniques, survey owners or presenters do not have options available for obtaining attention from users from different demographic and geographical sources. Further, trusting survey results may be quite challenging due to the presence and activities of the numerous Internet bots that attack such surveys, thereby disturbing or contaminating survey results.
Presently, online, digital testing may be deployed using similar approaches as described above. For example, one of the interesting types of testing is referred to as AB testing. For purposes of understanding herein, AB testing a type of testing that is used for comparing two items with the objective of help in decision-making. AB testing has been found to be very important in many areas such as branding, banner ads, marketing messages, promotion messages, launching new products, etc. AB testing also may be about randomly showing users participating in any user workflow on a particular website versions of a digital media content being tested, such as for example company logos, ads, models in ads, e.g. which model looks good in a particular costume to be on the cover of a major magazine, webpages, marketing analytics, ringtones, landing pages of websites, etc.